Europe’s identity is a theological project of racial and religious conviction

Evidence

Yet Europe remains, as I’ve said, in some awkward sense presumptively European. It remains the fantasized space, the “homeland,” of those always ever religiously white, of Christians secularized, of the prophylactically protected inner circle ranging from Anglo-Saxony to the Caucuses, from south of the North Pole to the northern shores of the Mediterranean. As flexible as Europe’s cartographic and imagined borders throughout modernity have always been, Europe is thus a theological project, as much of racial as religious conviction. The increasingly brown tinge, oil polluting the water, seeping through and across the map of European whiteness, needs guarding against lest it smudge Europe’s long-imagined make-up. That self-threatening clash of civilizations tugs at its sense of population, both its civility and its formal arrangements, promising to unravel its social fabric and removing any possibility of a cover other than mosaic. Europe’s dominant imagination is still not able to come to terms with that latter possibility, indeed, increasing likelihood. It is this self-generating, fearful threat that continues to prompt the impossible desire to close the borders, both around nation-states and circumscribing Europe’s selfproclaimed racial homogeneity. It seeks repeatedly to condomize itself by making the Different different so as to sustain the Same. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 950

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘condomize itself by making the Different different’ move resonates with Edward Said’s Orientalism logic and with the reader’s material on how moral panics reinscribe in-group boundaries via out-group marking. — connects to: European populists co-opt Christian symbols to cloak political aims in religious morality. — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 537; Race was co-constituted with religion in European history. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 31